Chapter 203: Chapter 171: Desperate Airliner (Part 2)
"A wise choice." The middle-aged man called Louis nodded in satisfaction and led his followers back to business class.
"Dad... I don’t think the people outside mean us any harm." Lisa, who was still in her seat, overheard the conversation up front. She leaned over and whispered to the man beside her.
"What makes you think that? They’re complete strangers," her father said, staring at Lisa with some surprise.
"It’s a gut feeling... My friends from the East, especially those from Xia Country, have always been very kind to me. And they saved us."
Lisa’s father shook his head.
"They might have ulterior motives. After all, we’re no use to them dead."
...
Han Ning stood outside for a full ten minutes, but there was still no reaction from anyone inside the plane.
"Heh, Dean Wu, it looks like these people don’t trust us," Lü Xiuning said with a strange laugh, glancing at the gloomy sky.
Dean Wu, on the other hand, seemed rather calm. He smiled.
"Let’s be fair. If we had just arrived here and suddenly encountered a group of strangers from an Alien Race, would we readily lower our guard and approach them?"
Lü Xiuning replied, "No, but we’d at least try to give them some kind of response instead of just leaving us out here to dry."
"Why don’t we just storm the plane? Whoever wants to come can come. We’ll just leave the ones who don’t. What’s with all this crap?" Lin Tianhe muttered under his breath.
"I agree," Han Ning added.
Still... ’It’s better to let the experienced Dean Wu handle this.’ They all shared this thought but didn’t voice their opinions aloud.
"Let’s give them some time to think it over. You can’t earn someone’s trust through force alone," Dean Wu said, glancing at the others around him. "Leave twenty people here to keep watch. The rest of you can head back."
The plane had landed just over a kilometer from the academy, practically next door. For this group, a kilometer was a distance they could cover in the time it took to exchange a few words.
At Dean Wu’s command, eighty of the one hundred people returned to the dormitory area with their Soul Beasts. Only twenty remained, standing and waiting quietly under a canopy of vines woven by a Wood Type Soul Beast.
「An hour passed...」
The rain showed no signs of letting up; in fact, it seemed to be getting heavier.
Lightning snaked across the sky.
Across the increasingly swampy ground, several grayish-white figures slithered without a trace. They moved along the blue-and-white fuselage and slowly crept into the crevices of the passenger jet.
...
"Lisa, does it hurt? I’ll go get you some medical supplies." Leon glanced down and suddenly noticed a long, thin, bloody scratch on his daughter’s thigh. After a look at the flight attendant, who was surrounded by a crowd, he unbuckled his seatbelt and started toward the front of the cabin.
As he headed toward the front of the cabin, he thought he could faintly hear a low hissing sound.
"AHH!! Help me! Help!"
"A monster! There’s a monster!"
"Quick, run!"
But the next second, a series of blood-curdling, agonized screams erupted from up ahead.
’What’s happening?’ Leon froze. The incessant hissing grew louder.
"Watch out!"
Before he could turn his head, a pair of strong hands grabbed him by the neck and yanked him down between the seats.
The next instant, the piercing sound of shattering glass was followed by a sharp hiss that whistled past right over his head.
"?!"
Leon’s heart leaped into his throat. He looked up to see an ugly, long snake coiled in a corner of the ceiling. It was as thick as a man’s arm, grayish-white in color, and had razor-sharp fangs.
’A snake? How did it get in?’
Staring at the snake as it let out a continuous, high-pitched whistle, Leon instinctively swallowed hard and took two steps back.
The grayish-white snake gave the humans no time to admire its "graceful" form. Its scales began to vibrate rapidly. Before anyone could react, it blurred into an afterimage, viciously sinking its slender, five-centimeter-long fangs into the neck of the nearest middle-aged man.
Crimson blood was instantly drained by the fangs, which glinted with a deadly chill. The snake’s originally grayish-white Body turned a deep, blood-like scarlet.
The skin of the man who had been bitten shriveled at a speed visible to the naked eye.
"Quick! Run!"
Every pore on Leon’s body prickled. He scrambled back, grabbed his daughter by the sleeve, and tried to run toward the rear of the cabin.
"AHH!!"
Seeing a living person die in the blink of an eye instantly ignited the panic in the cabin.
In an instant, the cabin descended into chaos. The narrow aisle was jammed with passengers trying to retreat to the back.
Everyone was pushing and shoving, scrambling over one another to get to the tail of the plane.
There were at least a hundred people in the cabin. With people in front of them and people behind them, Leon and his daughter were like ham in a sandwich, squeezed so tightly in the crowd they could barely move.
Amid the screams, the bizarre snake seemed to have finished its meal. It withdrew its fangs, seemingly wanting more, and fixed its scarlet eyes on the fleeing crowd.
Leon, who was over 1.8 meters tall, was particularly conspicuous in its eyes. With a flick of its body, it shot toward him.
Leon’s heart sank when the snake’s gaze fell on him. For the first time in his life, he hated being so tall.
"Damn it!"
"Lisa, watch out!"
Facing the snake as it flew toward him, he cursed under his breath, quickly pulling his daughter behind him. He snatched up a laptop from a nearby tray table—he had no idea whose it was—and swung it with all his might at the red shadow.
CRACK!!
The Metal laptop instantly bent into an arc. Leon felt an irresistible shockwave travel up from the impact, making his hands go numb. His body couldn’t take the force, and he stumbled backward uncontrollably.
His fall started a domino effect, knocking over the seven or eight people directly behind him.
The snake merely wobbled in mid-air before falling to the floor with a thud.
Seizing the opportunity while it was stunned, Leon scrambled back to his feet, grabbed the shattered laptop, raised his right hand, and with a roar, brought it crashing down on the snake.
Veins bulged on his forehead as he kept smashing it, roaring, "Listen to me! It’s not invincible! If you have any courage, grab whatever you can and help me kill it! Then we won’t have to run!"
His words spurred several other men into action. They grabbed whatever makeshift weapons they could find and began wailing on the snake.
One snake was no match for many hands. The previously unstoppable creature was pinned to the ground by several burly men. Its body ruptured, spilling scarlet blood, and it let out a piercing shriek. A moment later, it went completely still.
At almost the same moment, the group of people who had just stampeded to the rear of the cabin came screaming back toward Leon’s position.
Outside the windows, over a dozen more grayish-white snakes had appeared, identical in size and appearance to the one they had just killed.
They clung to the windows, their cold, reptilian eyes fixed on the humans inside as they began to repeatedly slam themselves against the glass.
Fortunately, the windows were made of specially reinforced tempered glass. They weren’t hitting the right spots, so it was unlikely they could break through quickly.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
The relentless thudding echoed through the cabin like a funeral toll.
"Waaaaah..."
"I want to go home."
"I want my mommy and daddy."
"Oh, God..."
"What even are these monsters?"
Leon struggled to his feet, his hands trembling, the skin between his thumb and forefinger split and bleeding. He scanned the snakes relentlessly striking the windows with their mouths, his expression grim.
"Dad... are we going to die?" Lisa clutched her father’s shirt, peeking out from behind his back to stare in terror at the monstrous snakes crawling outside.
"No, don’t even think that. As long as I’m here, you’ll be fine." Leon wrapped an arm around his daughter’s shoulder, his gaze sweeping to a corner outside the window.
It was pitch-black out there, but that was the direction from which the voices of the people from the East had come.
